Academic Resilience Consortium: “What Works”
I was too busy taking notes to get any screenshots…
On March 25th and 26th 2021, I attended the online conference “Academic Resilience: a ‘What Works’ Showcase,” presented by the Academic Resilience Consortium. I originally joined this organization during the 2020 quarantine in order to mine their Resource Library. They have since scaled up their operation and require payment of dues (at reasonable rates), but I was delighted to discover that this community addresses several issues that have been on my mind recently, and I paid for my membership at the conclusion of the conference. I would even like to see High Point University acquire an institutional membership, and… well I might be in a position to do something about that shortly (we’ll see).
Attending online conferences is sometimes a challenge during the academic year, and I was obliged to miss some of the sessions for both teaching and parenting duties. The sessions I was able to attend, however, were well-adapted to the Zoom format, and included regular breaks for networking and discussion. Some of the themes addressed included the transition to college instruction, common traits of Gen Z students, and scaling up pilot programs.
The transition to college instruction is something I have been thinking about all year, after my experience in teaching the first-semester Freshman honors students in the Fall. I was delighted to find that all of my intuitions had been accurate: the difference between high school and college teaching requires a mentored transition, students are ill-prepared to deal with failure in the current climate, and the “hidden curriculum” is a significant issue across the country. I had team-taught the 1000-level honors course with a colleague that I disagreed with profoundly on these issues, and I revived the growth-mindset action study that had been sidelined by COVID in response to some of his more problematic methods. Again, after attending the sessions, I was delighted to find that I was addressing these problems in accordance with best practices in the field: building a culture of trust, normalizing failure, and teaching resilience strategies. I am eager to strengthen my methods in this direction, and I would actually like to see hidden curriculum and resilience pedagogy incorporated into both the honors program and even the first-year seminars generally. This might be something I can impact via CITL or the soon-to-be-created General Education Council.
Dr. Shanique McCallister Nixon of Tennessee State gave a powerful talk about the success of HBCU’s in addressing these issues, which she connected with familial capital, interdisciplinary engagement, and the tradition of HBCU’s in itself. Since I started my career at an HBCU, I had seen these things first hand, and I especially appreciated her comment that “PWI’s” (Predominantly White Institutions… an acronym I will definitely be incorporating into my vocabulary!) too often ignore their neighboring HBCUs. Even my institution, which very publicly gave money to support Bennett College, would probably balk at the idea that we could learn anything from them. In fact, it was refreshing to hear HBCUs celebrated for their success as all. Too often we hear them criticized for their challenges, many of which are grossly misleading. I once heard a college counselor assert, in all seriousness, that one could judge the quality of a college by its six-year graduation rate. She then put up a chart of the figures for several local colleges, including Davidson, Wake Forest, and Duke, and scoffed at Winston-Salem State for “only” being around 60%. I kept my anger to myself on that one, but maybe I should have called her out…
I have been feeling recently, that I may be too old to teach anymore. While this might sound like a joke at first, I am seriously concerned about the distance between my experience of the world and my students, who are growing up in an entirely different culture. If movies made in the 90s don’t make any sense to my sons, how opaque are the examples I’m using in class? For this reason I particularly appreciated the discussions of Gen Z and their perspective. These were among the most powerful ideas:
Gen Z is the most disconnected, loneliest generation on record
Gen Z are social media savvy and realists, as opposed to the Millennials, who were tech savvy and idealists
Gen Z communicate through images, prefer text messaging, and understand the world through games
Gen Z is seeking independent work
Without getting too ridiculous, there are certainly some things to consider here, and Dr. Soulyka Agana- Woodbine described significant success at Trinity Washington University in engaging students with career services through a gamified experience. I’ll continue to meditate on it.
Finally, there was a wealth of ideas and models for taking pilot programs to the next level of scale: from class to department, college, and institutional levels. While some of these were wildly incompatible with the culture at High Point, I appreciated the valuable tips for keeping records, having a good relationship with the IRB office, publishing results, and so forth. While the projects I’m involved with may or may not be in like to scale up in this way, I have suffered on both ends: not recording what was done and not thinking ahead to the next steps.
It is always psychologically satisfying to attend conference where I agree with everyone, but this one was really affirming: I am on the right track, and I am not alone. This experience gave me confidence that I could make an impact on the resilience literature, and also bring added weight to my influence on departmental policy… and maybe even higher up the chain? We’ll see…